Lotman is a brief biography

Life as a text: what Lotman did 28 February Igor Pilshchikov today marks a hundred years since the birth of Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman-the great literary critic, the founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic school. Philologist Igor Pilshchikov, who studied with Lotman in Tartu, at the request of the “shelf” briefly tells about the main thing what the scientist who changed Russian humanitarian science has done.

Yuri Lotman. In the year, he entered the University of Leningrad, where he began to engage in folklore at the seminar of Vladimir Propp and listened to Grigory Grigory Grigory Aleksandrovich Gukovsky - - literary critic. He headed the Department of Russian Literature of Leningrad University. The author of the first systematic course on this topic. He was evacuated from the besieged Leningrad to Saratov.

After the war, he was arrested as part of the campaign to fight cosmopolitanism, and died in conclusion from a heart attack. In the year he was drafted into the army and served the whole war in artillery, having finished the journey in Berlin with two military orders and six medals. In the year he returned to his studies, listened to lectures by Viktor Zhirmunsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eichenbaum and other outstanding philologists of the pre -war formation, and wrote the thesis under the leadership of Nikolai Mordovchenko.

Lotman graduated from the university in the midst of an anti -Semitic campaign that did not allow a brilliant graduate and recent front -line soldier to continue training in graduate school or find a job in Leningrad. I had to leave; So Lotman got into Tartu - the main university city of Estonia and the Baltic region as a whole. After some time, Lotman headed the department of Russian literature of the University of Tartu, and at the end of his life founded the Department of Semiotics there.

Yuri Lotman Lotman, a literature historian, a year and a half after graduation, Lotman defended his thesis on socio-political and aesthetic positions of Alexander Radishchev and Nikolai Karamzin. The researcher was interested in the relationship between the aesthetic, ethical and political views of those whom in those years they called representatives of the "noble revolutionaryness", and their opponents.

The beginning of the “long 19th century” - in the history of Russian literature it is marked by the change of Karamzinsky period Pushkinsky, and in the history of Russian antimonarchist thought - its evolution from Radishchev to the Decembrists. From the point of view of traditional literary criticism, the first was more important, from the point of view of official social science - the second, but in reality both processes occurred at the same time, and this circumstance required a serious scientific understanding.

Contrary to the imposed orthodox-Marxist theory, one process was not a direct reflection of another, and the movement from Radishchev to the Decembrists was not straightforward. The reconstruction of this movement led Lotman to a friendly literary society that existed during the year in Moscow. In a monograph on one of his participants, the future professor of Tartu, then the University of Derpt, Andrei Kaysarov Tartu, Lotman shows how, in the focus, “three leading trends in the literature of the Podushkinsky period” - Vasily Zhukovsky, later the Enlightenment of Alexei Merzlyakov, came together in the focus and at first glance, the trends of the literature of the Podopushki period.

Partly Alexander Voeikov Alexander Fedorovich Voeikov - - poet, translator, critic, journalist. Member of the Literary Society "Arzamas". Since the year he was the editor of the magazine "Son of the Fatherland". He was close to the circle of Andrei Turgenev and Vasily Zhukovsky. Critically treated symbolism, adhered to political civil poetry. He wrote the thesis "On the Liberation of the serfs in Russia", worked on the "Dictionary of the Old Russian Language".

He became one of the historical characters of the “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy. The role of a friendly literary society in the history of Russian culture is a short -term consolidation of leading literary and intellectual forces, which had a significant impact on the subsequent development of culture turned out to be similar to the role that Arzamas will play a half decades later.

Lotman was not interested in ideology and poetics in themselves, but their relationship. This approach found the application in the comments and preface to the exemplary volumes of the Poet Library - “Poems” by Merzlyakov, the anthology “Poets of the beginning of the 19th century”, the Small series, “The Complete Collection of Poems” by Karamzin and Anthology “Poets -Her Years”, published together with Mark Altshuller.

Among the texts introduced into active cultural circulation in the last of the mentioned publications are such forgotten masterpieces as the Elegy Andrei Turgenev “gloomy autumn, the dead hand defending the doctoral dissertation of“ the development path of Russian literature of the Democratic period, ”Lotman takes the following research step - to the era of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol.

Tartu, September of the year Lotman-Pushkinist, refusing to separate ideology and poetics, Lotman makes the subject of study the structure of the text-a complexly organized unity of relations between all elements of the text and the text as a whole, creating its meaning.Hence the title of the series of the first Pushkin -studies of Lotman: “The ideological structure of the“ captain’s daughter ”,“ the artistic structure of “Eugene Onegin”; The article was deployed into the book-spectacular book “Roman in Pushkin’s poems“ Eugene Onegin ”,“ The ideological structure of Pushkin’s poem “Angelo” since the structure is a system of relations, the material implementation of which becomes the text, the analysis of the literary text should be analyzed by binary opposition organizing it.

So, for the composition “Evgeny Onegin” is important that his “chapters are built according to the system of paired contrasts: Onegin - St. Petersburg society; Onegin is the author; Onegin - Lensky; Onegin - landowners; Onegin is Tatyana ”, etc., other levels of text are organized with similar resistance to Lotman's neologism. This approach allows Lotman to explain why in the novel, all raised questions are given different, often mutually exclusive answers: they reflect the multiplicity of the points of view of co- and opposed to each other, including the narrator himself and the stereoscopic combination of the contradictions that arise in the clash of various views on the same object.

Lotman owns the most famous monographic commentary on Eugene Onegin L. This book consists of two complementary parts. The first is the “Essay of the Nobility of the Onegin Rel” - a presentation of the norms and rules that regulated the worldview and the domestic behavior of the nobleman of the Pushkin time. The second part is actually a stubborn and constructed comment.

In addition to the explanation of obsolete words and realities, Lotman pays attention to a variety of literary quotes with which the novel is permeated, and also interprets the behavior of the heroes, finding in their words and actions a dramatic clash of points of view and behavioral norms. Another achievement of Lotman Pushkinism is the book “Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin: the biography of the writer”, the purpose of which is the conceptualization of “creative personality as a complex combination of sociopsychological mechanisms”.

Throughout his life, Pushkin was included “in three specific situations: 1 poet and literature; 2 poet and political life; 3 Poet and the world of daily life. ” None of them has an absolute priority, "and only from their totality does Pushkin's genuine face arise in life." Clearing the Pushkin evolution on these three lines, we are observing the gradual transformation of the poet of aristocrat and Liberten, practicing the ethical, political and religious freedom, in a professional writer and journalist, an enlightened conservative, a family man and a house-building.

In a hopeless situation that threatens his life project, Pushkin chooses a duel and dies. The biographer makes a significant reservation: “It is incorrect to imagine the“ construction of personality ”as a dry rational process: as in art, here the conceived plan is adjacent to intuitive finds and instant insights prompting the decision. Together, this forms that mixture of conscious and unconscious, which is characteristic of all creativity.

” Yuri Lotman Lotman - Lotman's Literature theoretician in the year, published “Lectures on structural poetics”, which were immediately perceived as a manifesto of the new structuralist literary criticism, proceeding from the ideas that language elements and, according to analogy, elements of artistic structure are determined not by their substantial properties, but by relations with each other determining their correlation and their correlation and correlation contrast between their functions in the general system.

Such, for example, is the dialectic of the verse, the structure of which includes “cyclical repetition of different elements in the same positions in order to equate the unequal and reveal the similarity in different” meters, and “repetition of the same in order to reveal the imaginary nature of this equal, establish the difference in a similar“ rhythm. The text is not autonomous, but is an element of a more complex system: the artistic work “consists of the text of the intra -textual relationship system” and “embedded relations”, that is, the text relations with non -texture reality and with other texts, as well as literary norms and traditions that set reader expectation.

Therefore, for the structure of the text, it is significant not only what is in the text, but also that which does not have a “minus”. The lack of rhyme in ancient poetry where there is no rhyme or in the culture of Verlibra where rhyme is no longer an artistically significant element, but its absence in Pushkin’s “I again visited in the next two books Lotman sets out the same circle of ideas, clarifying them and adapting to new tasks.

In the monograph “The structure of the literary text”, the foundations of structuralist aesthetics are reinforced by elements of the theory of information. In the monograph “Analysis of the poetic text”, a compressed presentation of the goals and methods of structural analysis of the verse precedes examples of specific analysis of the poems of Batyushkov, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Nekrasov, A.

Tolstoy, Blok, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky and Zabolotsky.For Lotman, the main vice of traditional literary criticism is the inability to dialectically comprehend the relationship between form and content. Literary scholars separately study the “ideas” of the writer and his “skill”. But why read a novel or poem if their ideas can be stated on two pages of a textbook? In “Lectures on Structural Poetics”, Lotman quotes Lev Tolstoy’s statement about “Anna Karenina” from a letter to Nikolai Insurance of April 23: it is impossible to retell the novel, for this it will have to write the same words again.

Lotman contrasts strict scientific scientific dogmatism and pseudo -acting impressionism. The article “Literary criticism should be science” The title is given by the editors of “Literature Questions” Lotman describes the “Literature of the new type” - this is “A researcher who needs to combine wide possession of independent empirical material with the skills of deductive thinking developed by accurate sciences”; “Ideally,” he should “combine literary critic, linguist and mathematics”.

Today, in the digital era, this wording is more relevant than ever. Yuri Lotman at the University of Tartu, Lotman - Semiotik and culturologist Semiotics, the science of signs and sign systems attracted Lotman as a discipline that reveals the most general patterns in literature and - wider - in art and culture as a whole. In the study of literature, methods of structural linguistics can be supplemented by structural and semiiotic methods, and a synchronous analysis of the text with a diachronical analysis of the functioning of the work in a changing historical context.

According to Lotman, only elementary semiotic phenomena can be studied purely synchronically, while complex ones require diachronic analysis, since such systems contain their own history. That is why the structuralist cannot be limited to synchrony, but "forced to be a historian." From this thesis, Lotman draws far -reaching conclusions, which allowed him to revise the communication scheme proposed by Jacobson in the fundamental article “Linguistics and Poetics”, where six “constitutional factors” of a communicative act were allocated.

According to Jacobson, so that the addressee could send some message a text, it is necessary for both of the reference object of the context, a common language and communication channel contact for them. However, Lotman objects, “the language contains not only the code, but also the history of the code” including an individual history: each of us has our own, which has developed during individual development, a unique version of the nationwide language - idiomine.

For this reason, as well as due to the difference between the grammars of the speaker and the listening languages ​​of the addressee and the addressee, they never completely coincide. The act of communication becomes an act of translation from the language of the speaker who speaks the language of the listener. But any translation transforms the initial value, so the meaning of the text of the text turns out to be itself-not-equal, and constantly transformed in the process of means and renewal of the semiosis.

If, according to Jacobson, semiotic systems are characterized by complete interpretability, then according to Lotman - fundamentally incomplete, and in it Lotman sees the productive mechanism of culture. The semiotic approach allowed Lotman to compare artistic sign systems with non -artistic and quasi -fiber - such as aesthetized or ideologically loaded everyday behavior. The circle of Lotman's interests includes topics that can be judged by the names of books and articles: “Semiotics of Cinema and the problems of film aesthetics” Tallinn, “The theme of cards and card games in Russian literature of the beginning of the 19th century”, Semiotics Lubka “Artistic Nature of Russian Folk Pictures”, the iconic nature of the scenario space “Semiotics of the stage”, and painting, and painting “Still Still Mortge in the future”, a separate cycle is made up of work on the semiotics of artistic space in Russian medieval texts, prose of Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov and in the “Divine Comedy” Dante.

Of particular interest are studies on the theory of biography and semiotics of behavior “Decembrist in everyday life”; “Poetics of everyday behavior in Russian culture of the 18th century,”, the practical application of which was the Lotman biographies of Pushkin and Karamzin “Cremzin's Creation”. Structural-semiotic analysis of behavior takes into account not only human actions, but also the interpretation of them with others.

The program of behavior correlates with specific actions in the same way as in the linguistic model of Ferdinand de Saussure, the language of a social phenomenon and speech individual phenomenon are correlated. Just as the sequence of statements-messages is built into an oral or written text, the sequence of actions is built into the “behavioral text”, “written” in the language of the corresponding culture.In the article "The right to biography"; During publication, this bright title was replaced that the biography is a constructed narrative, sifting “an accident of real events through the cultural codes of the era”, which “not only select relevant facts from the entire mass of life actions, but also become a program of future behavior”.

Semiotics of culture involves the consideration of ideological, aesthetic and domestic phenomena in their structural-functional unity. Such unity is a culture as a “non -investigative memory of the collective” - a sign system that serves for the generation, storage and transfer of the entire “set of non -investigative information” of mankind as a whole or its individual groups.

But human culture is neither the largest nor the only semiotic mechanism. To denote the total space of the semiosis of Lotman, by analogy with the concepts of the biosphere and noosphere introduced by the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, put forward the concept of the semiosphere. Thus, he proposed a general conceptual platform for the semiotics of culture and biosemiotics.

The works of this cycle are combined into a book, which was posthumously under the title “inside the thinking worlds”, and during the life of the author - translated into English under the title “Universe of the mind. Semiotic theory of culture. " From the personal archive of prof. Kiselevoy Lotman-Culturer Lotman was an outstanding lecturer. His lectures at the University of Tartu were gathered from all courses and faculties.

He was aroused by his “output” reports in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities. Each new article or book of the Tartu professor was perceived by the humanitarian community as an event. But the “conversations of Russian culture” - five cycles of television programs of 35 lectures shown in the years first according to Estonian, and then on All -Union television, were really widely known to Lotmann.